Sundance prizewinner Lemohang Mosese is in post-production with his fourth feature film, “Ancestral Visions of the Future,” which he’ll be presenting during the Venice Production Bridge’s Final Cut pics-in-post workshop for films from Africa and the Arab world.
The film is described as “a deeply personal exploration of identity, childhood, death and exile through the eyes of a puppeteer, a mother, a boy, a farmer and a city.” Pitched as an “allegorical essay,” it centers on a puppeteer in a marketplace in an anonymous African town who wants the locals to return to their ancestral ways.
An herbalist, preacher and erstwhile prophet, the puppeteer “preaches to [the villagers] about beauty, about what people can become,” Mosese tells Variety. “He wants to prolong their lives, because he believes that human life is so magnificent but so short — they live such a short life span to correct the mistakes of their predecessors.
“[But] the city becomes cruel to him. Like many people, the city puts a yoke around them and crushes them into the earth.”
The director describes “Ancestral Visions” as his most autobiographical film to date and an attempt to create something whole from the “fragmented memory of my past.” “It’s the closest thing to how I think, and it’s the…closest thing to my life, to the actual events that happened in my childhood,” he says.
Mosese was raised in Lesotho, a small, mountainous Southern African kingdom that has one of the highest murder rates in the world. Throughout his childhood, violence was a fact of everyday life. At an early age, his family was evicted from their home and forced to relocate to the outskirts of his hometown, Hlotse, an experience the 44-year-old described as “the first time when I lost the sense of a place.”
Based in Berlin in recent years, Mosese has wrestled with the subject of exile in both his career and personal life. “I always wanted to go back to a place of return. I’ve always thought I’m in transit. I never thought I was going to stay in Germany,” he says. “I’ve always been thinking…that one day I’m going to go back, to return to a place — that I’m going back home. I’m going to this beautiful place.”
He was suddenly jolted from that perspective one year ago, after an extended period of travel and “interrogating myself,” when, sitting at a café in Berlin, he witnessed a disheveled African man “speaking in his mother tongue, shouting.” For Mosese, it was something like an out-of-body experience.
“At that moment, I felt mirrored. I felt that my past — being here and being over there — it just collided. Our lives, both of us, collided,” he says. “The only difference is that I was not in rags. I was having cappuccino and a croissant. But we merged at that moment. And I felt like I understood him.
“In that moment, I realized that the idea of going home was never real, was never my intention. Was just a mirage,” Mosese continues. “It’s a thing that kept me enduring the treachery. It kept me enduring my trials and tribulations in Europe, because I was looking forward to going home. And then, at that time, I started to realize, this place is just in my head.”
That startling realization led to a series of questions that forced him to revisit his childhood and the country he left behind through film, asking himself: “Was that place that I left so bad? What made me leave? What was the cost?”
“Ancestral Visions,” which is produced by Agat Films in co-production with Mokaoari Street Media and Seera Films, arrives five years after Mosese made his debut on the international festival circuit with his sophomore feature, “Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You,” an elegiac docufiction that grappled with the filmmaker’s exile from Lesotho and premiered in the Berlinale’s Forum strand in 2019.
“This Is Not a Burial” was Lesotho’s first ever Academy Award submission.
Courtesy of Urucu Media
His next film, “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection,” a sumptuously framed, quasi-mythic tale about an 80-year-old widow whose village is threatened with forced resettlement to accommodate the construction of a nearby dam, debuted in the international competition at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020, where it won a special jury prize for “visionary filmmaking.”
Described by Variety’s Guy Lodge in a rapturous review as “the kind of myth-rooted, avant-garde Southern African storytelling that rarely cracks the international festival circuit,” it would go on to become the first film ever submitted by Lesotho for the best international feature film Oscar race.
Mosese credits his mother, who served as inspiration for “Ancestral Visions,” for helping him survive his difficult childhood, when he says “my teachers and my grandmother always said that I’m going to end up dead or in jail.” After the family was evicted, his mother would insist to them: “It’s just temporary. I’m going to build something for you guys.”
“The idea of dreams, the idea of believing, it comes from my mother,” Mosese says. “Coming from Lesotho, it’s almost like one has to be delusional to believe that you will make it in cinema.”
